


Recognition

by DeCarabas



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, Jaws of Hakkon DLC
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-30
Updated: 2018-09-30
Packaged: 2019-07-16 06:16:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16080176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeCarabas/pseuds/DeCarabas
Summary: For the prompt: "Colette is an academic out in the field hunting for clues about who Ameridan was, Ameridan has been rescued after 800 years of fending off a powerful dragon abomination. Imagine if he survived and could give answers to some of the theories she'd been researching."Colette meets her history crush.





	Recognition

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dawnstone](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dawnstone/gifts).



After the Inquisitor’s visit, Colette spends the remainder of the day documenting the Tevinter ruins. She barely notices the darkening sky until she finds herself struggling to make out her own notes, until a green light flashes overhead and illuminates the page. And she looks up just as a glowing wisp darts through the air and brushes against her cheek.  

At its touch, a deep, pleasant voice echoes through her mind.

_We have a plan. Haron and Orinna will lead the Avvar elsewhere, so Telana and I can deal with the dragon. My spirit companion believes we can seal the dragon away, even if we cannot kill it. It is less clear whether I can do so without—_

The voice cuts off as the wisp drifts away, taking up a position circling the statue at the heart of the ruins. And Colette frowns up at it in consternation.

Spirits. Always meddling with the most important sites. Useful for preservation, but then they make it impossible to date anything accurately; mimicking history, but with no way to tell how much of what they say reflects the actual events and how much came from someone’s wild imagination. About as reliable as insights from a dream. And its presence in these ruins means she’s going to have to be doubly careful to verify everything she’s discovered here—not that she wouldn’t have done that anyway.

Still, she scrambles to jot down its exact words before she forgets them.

It’s something, to hear Ameridan’s voice here in this place where he and his companions had walked, still lingering after all these years. Even if it isn’t real.

It’s a long walk back to the base camp, and bird song’s given way to chirping insects and the occasional rustling of some unseen creature in the undergrowth—some nocturnal predator probably, and she’s probably not lucky enough to be rescued by the Inquisitor twice in the same day, and she should really see about bringing along some Inquisition scouts for the return trip tomorrow. But even the prospect of another hungry pack of lurkers can’t dampen her excitement much, and she spends the walk mentally cataloguing the work still to be done. The discoveries she’s made today alone, the contributions to their understanding of Inquisitor Ameridan’s era of early Chantry history—it’s a feast after spending years searching for scraps.

Tonight definitely deserves a treat from her limited stash of hot cocoa, she decides.

There’s a crowd clustered in the lights of the base camp, so many people hanging around the gate that she can’t manage to get through; she just manages to spot the surgeon running towards them, then ducking out of her sight.

When she asks what’s going on, one of the scouts in front of her answers in a hushed whisper. “They found the last Inquisitor.”

She thinks her heart just stopped. “The resting place? It’s here?” _We were right. Maker, this book is going to make history._

The scout shakes his head, and he points through the crowd, leaning aside just enough for her to see what everyone’s clustered around, the unconscious man that the surgeon’s kneeling over. “They found the _Inquisitor_.”

She doesn’t recognize the man on the ground. One of the Dalish scouts, clearly, with the tattoos, but not one she knows—though that antique armor he’s wearing isn’t Inquisition uniform; it looks almost like—

It penetrates. _“What?”_  

* * *

Inquisitor Ameridan looks nothing like she’d imagined. And granted, the historical records are quite vague on his appearance—and privately, her mental image had been mostly based on an Orlesian novel about the Inquisitor and his lady mage; it was quite tasteful, really—and granted, lying unconscious on the surgeon’s cot is perhaps not the most accurate of first impressions.

He looks kind, the lines of his face. Smile lines. She hadn’t expected that. 

* * *

Breaking down the camp and getting ready for the journey to Skyhold, Colette hesitates outside the surgeon’s tent, her arms full of a box of mineral samples. There’s a pair of guards keeping watch, but she and Professor Kenric have been in and out of that tent all day, and the guards pay her no mind anymore.

The surgeon and the spirit healer have stepped outside at the moment, locked in a heated debate about bile and bloodletting. They’ve been doing a lot of that. Inquisitor Ameridan keeps drifting in and out of consciousness, and there isn’t a standard method of treatment for eight hundred years’ worth of magical exhaustion, or for the sudden loss of some kind of spirit companion who’s kept you alive all that time.

But she’s hearing voices inside the tent too. And the real Ameridan’s voice sounds just the same as he had in her head, at the wisp’s touch.

_He’s awake._

Peering through the tent flap, she sees that strange boy that the Inquisitor—the other Inquisitor—that Inquisitor Lavellan has been looking after, the boy whose name she can never remember.

“Too bright, blinding, breaking, broken. ‘Get to safety. I will seal us both away. …It's not forever.’”

Cole. That’s his name. Colette doesn’t know how she keeps forgetting that.

She sees Ameridan’s hand grasp Cole’s, then fall back. And feeling she’s intruding, Colette lets the tent flap fall closed, just as she hears Ameridan say, “Thank you.” 

* * *

A career spent picking away at pieces of a mystery, and now she’s had the whole answer dumped in her lap all at once. She’s still not sure she believes it.

And that’s the trouble. Even with all their documentation of the Inquisitor’s last days in the Frostback Basin, when it comes to proving that the man now recovering in Skyhold is who he says he is, there’s very little in the way of physical evidence and a whole lot depending on Inquisitor Lavellan’s word about what she saw, dragon-god skull or no.

And for anyone already inclined to mistrust the Inquisition, Colette has to admit it’s a bit of a stretch. So convenient for Inquisitor Lavellan, the elven upstart who crowned herself as the new Inquisitor and declared the rebel mages under her protection, to suddenly discover that the last true Inquisitor was really an elf, and a mage, and here in the flesh to give her his blessing; the perfect precedent conjured out of nothing, too convenient to be believed.

And then there’s those who accept the Inquisition’s claims just because they think supporting the Inquisition could work to their own advantage, not because they care about the truth or the accuracy of Colette’s research one way or the other. History dependent on politics. That leaves an even worse taste in her mouth. 

Which is why Professor Kenric is packing for Orzammar and the Shaperate, prepared to search for every scrap of corroborating evidence of their claims, when the answer to all their questions is right there in Skyhold’s guest quarters.

“It’s the chance of a lifetime,” the professor says for what has to be the dozenth time, somehow managing to sound both giddy and as if he’s trying to convince himself at once. Colette can sympathize; under any other circumstances, she would be mad with jealousy at a chance to access the Shaperate’s records.

But it’s hard to be jealous, when instead she’s sitting beside Ameridan’s bedside as he patiently answers her questions, trading every answer for a question of his own; as she sketches Haron and Orinna from his description until they’re both satisfied with the result, while she tells him, haltingly, about their last stand, and then about the Dales, Drakon, the Blights, and Seekers and mages and spirits and the alienage where she grew up and Qunari hot cocoa, and the dragons that no one hunts anymore, or hardly anyone aside from Professor Frederic anyway, because they’d seemed extinct until they weren’t, another wonder from the past that everyone had thought was gone forever. Everything. As much of the past eight hundred years as she can piece together for him.

* * *

_Maker, he’s tall_ , she thinks the first time she sees him out of bed without needing his staff to lean on; and then when she sees him in the long lines of the Inquisition’s formal uniform, looking like he’d just stepped out of that Orlesian novel.

He looks even taller as he moves through the alleyways of Halamshiral, the line of his back ramrod straight, and they draw curious looks as they move deeper into the slums. And this isn’t where they’re supposed to be; their diplomatic visit to the Winter Palace on their way to the University, the stops along the way, the meeting with Keeper Levinia Ghilain, it’s all been carefully scheduled. But he follows her lead when she veers off the planned path; gives her a curious look, and then sets out as if he knows where he’s going, ground-devouring strides, putting an end to the protest of their escort in formal livery and formal masks, forcing the escort to hurry to keep up with them.

The river might not have changed since his time, or the mountains around the city, but everything else must have. Even just within Colette’s lifetime, the city’s changed beyond recognition. She can still see the scars where the Empress of Fire earned her name; whole neighborhoods gone, cobbled-together shelters that can’t have been standing for more than a year and don’t look likely to hold together for much longer, older buildings left abandoned, roofs fallen in and doors boarded over.

All this to remind the elves not to forget their place. And yet now Colette’s walking through Halamshiral at Ameridan’s side with a sword slung across her back, an elf openly carrying a weapon within the city, and not one guard has tried to stop her.

Ameridan pauses on a bridge over the river, identical to half a dozen others, of no particular significance that Colette can see. His hands gripping the iron railing.

“Andraste’s children were the ones who granted us the Dales in the first place,” he says, sounding more bewildered than anything else. “For Drakon’s chantry to be the ones to do—this—”

He doesn’t finish the thought, just spreads his hands wordlessly.

 _Drakon’s chantry_. As if it was just that, just a group of the faithful started by a friend of his.

Hesitant, she puts her hand over his, where he’s been gripping the railing. And she watches his shoulders sag as a little of the tension goes out of him.

She asks him what it was like, the old Halamshiral, the way he remembers it. And looking up at the Winter Palace silhouetted against the sky in the distance, he begins to tell her, clasping her hand in his own.

Everything always seems so meaningful in the stories about him, the novels and the historical accounts both. Like every event has a purpose behind it. There may be pieces missing in the records, but when she’s reading, it’s always felt like if she could just fill in enough of those blanks, the world would make sense. 

But he’s not a character in a book.

* * *

“Would it be that bad, if you can’t prove who I am?”

They’re sitting in Skyhold’s garden, with one of the books on the Divine Age that Ameridan had asked her for. _The Sword of Drakon: An Examination of the Life and History of the Father of Orlais._  Though it’s far from the most historically accurate depiction of Drakon’s life after Ameridan's disappearance. He passes her a mug as he sits down, unasked, and she’s startled to find it full of hot cocoa.

And that question’s such an understatement, she barely knows where to begin.

“There’s so much we’ve forgotten,” she manages. “You’re—everything.” _Eloquent_.

He’d spent half the morning in the undercroft with Dagna and Harritt and his perfectly preserved Divine Age armor, listening to them argue over innovation and older methods, historical techniques that have gotten lost over time, across the Exalted Marches, the Blights.

And he comes from a time period when there was just _the_ Blight, one, a singular event, and over and done with; when people hadn’t believed there would ever be another, not even when the darkspawn had already overrun half the Anderfels. She can’t picture what that would be like, the kind of future he must have imagined for the world, without the Blights constantly knocking them down again. As if you’d only have to get through one winter, and then it would be flowers for the rest of your days. It must have seemed like anything was possible.

And he’s not sure it matters if anyone recognizes who he is.

Just the sheer fact of him makes anything seem possible again.


End file.
